Dems Advocate For Passage Of Campus Safety Act

Four years and five months after the Virginia Tech Shooting that killed 33 students, Reps. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) and Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) offered their endorsement of the Campus Safety Act, an initiative aimed towards providing students with better protection.

“The purpose of the legislation is to enable our institutions of higher education to more easily obtain the best information on how to keep our campuses safe and how to respond in the event of a campus emergency,” Scott told reporters at a press conference Thursday. 

The Campus Safety Act will create a National Center for Campus Public Safety that will train campus public safety agencies, promote research to strengthen college safety and security, and serve as a central agency to disperse relevant campus safety information. 

Cummings spoke of his 20-year old nephew, Christopher Cummings, who was murdered this year outside his apartment near Old Dominion University’s campus.

“We should not be sending our children to school and they come back in a coffin,” Cummings declared. “Christopher is dead. He is gone. The question now is what can we do to take our pain and frustration as a family and turn it around to bring some light out of his death. This legislation is without a doubt one of the best ways to do that.”

Scott has introduced the Campus Safety Act in the past and it has seen success in the House, having been passed in both the 110th and 111th Congresses.